After Years of Abusive E-mails, the Creator of Linux Steps Aside (The New Yorker)

Posted Sep 20, 2018 13:56 UTC (Thu) by niner (subscriber, #26151)
In reply to: After Years of Abusive E-mails, the Creator of Linux Steps Aside (The New Yorker) by jkingweb
Parent article: After Years of Abusive E-mails, the Creator of Linux Steps Aside (The New Yorker)

Good question! Was the Redis project really forced to remove those words? And a good followup would then be "by whom?". But we won't even get to the followup, because the claim seems to be wrong in the first place. After some controversy the Redis team took an online poll on the question of whether to replace the apparently offensive terms and the result came out much in favor of doing so, even though in the question itself it was pointed out that this could cause issues.

The poll can still be found here:
https://twitter.com/antirez/status/1038094104129937408

So, no, based on this evidence, my conclusion is that Redis was _not_ in fact forced to remove those words. The team chose to do so.

After Years of Abusive E-mails, the Creator of Linux Steps Aside (The New Yorker)

Posted Sep 20, 2018 16:33 UTC (Thu) by jrigg (guest, #30848) [Link] (2 responses)

> Redis was _not_ in fact forced to remove those words

I got the distinct impression that it was a reluctant decision. There was some bad behaviour before that poll from the person who claimed the words were offensive:
http://antirez.com/news/122

Accusing a person of being a fascist (when that person's family had previously been persecuted by fascists) is not very pleasant.

After Years of Abusive E-mails, the Creator of Linux Steps Aside (The New Yorker)

Posted Sep 20, 2018 16:54 UTC (Thu) by niner (subscriber, #26151) [Link] (1 responses)

How do we get from "someone wasn't pleasant to me and I took a poll and I did some thing based on the result" to "someone forced me"?

After Years of Abusive E-mails, the Creator of Linux Steps Aside (The New Yorker)

Posted Sep 20, 2018 17:27 UTC (Thu) by jrigg (guest, #30848) [Link]

> How do we get from "someone wasn't pleasant to me and I took a poll and I did some thing based on the result" to "someone forced me"?
It is possible to be forced by public opinion. Why do these discussions always seem to become confrontational?